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Case 1:20-cr-00330-AJN Document 144 Filed 02/04/21 Page 19 of 25
Since Bridges, the Court has repeatedly emphasized that statutory references to an
“offense involving” or “offenses involving” certain elements call for such an approach. See
Shular, 140 S.Ct. at 785; Kawashima v. Holder, 565 U.S. 478, 484 (2012) (interpreting “offenses
that involve fraud or deceit” to mean “offenses with elements that necessarily entail fraudulent or
deceitful conduct’) (internal punctuation omitted); Leocal v. Ashcroft, 543 U.S. 1, 7 (2004)
(stating that “offense that .. . involves” language “requires us to look to the elements and the
nature of the offense . . .rather than to the particular facts” at issue); see also United States v.
Davis, 139 S. Ct. 2319, 2328 (2019) (“In all but the most unusual situations, a single use of a
statutory phrase must have a fixed meaning.”). Thus, only if the offense “necessarily entails” the
identified conduct can it be said to be an “offense involving” that conduct. Kawashima, 565 U.S.
at 484.
In United States v. Morgan, the D.C. Circuit used this approach in interpreting 18 U.S.C.
§ 3237(a), a venue statute that applies to “[a]ny offense involving the use of the mails,
transportation in interstate or foreign commerce, or the importation of an object or person into
the United States.” The court concluded that “[t]he most natural reading” of the statute is “to
construe ‘any offense involving’ by reference to the e/ements of the offense at issue.” 393 F.3d
192, 198 (D.C. Cir. 2004) (emphasis in original). The court then gave an illustrative example of
a case in which a defendant travels in interstate commerce, commits a federal offense, and then
returns home via interstate commerce:
[T]he circumstances surrounding the crime include [the defendant’s] travel in
interstate commerce, but his crime is not an “offense involving” transportation in
interstate commerce. In other words, a faithful reading of the precise words of the
statute in the order in which they are written suggests that an “offense involv[es]”
transportation in interstate commerce only when such transportation is an element
of the offense.
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| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00002667.jpg |
| File Size | 705.5 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.1% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,184 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 16:25:59.550324 |